Business intelligence (BI) refers to a broad category of applications and technologies for gathering, storing, analyzing, and providing access to data to help information workers (IWs) make better business decisions. BI applications typically address activities such as decision support systems, querying, reporting, online analytical processing (OLAP), statistical analysis, forecasting, and data mining. BI tools allow IWs to create and execute a certain class of BI applications over a multi-dimensional data model, such a pivot table, a cube, or other hierarchical dimensional storage, thereby achieving sophisticated analytical results from increasingly complex data.
Data mining is a process that typically involves extracting patterns or relationships from data, particularly from large volumes of aggregated data. Often, the magnitude and complexity of the aggregated data makes it difficult for information workers (IW) to discover or discern patterns of interest within the data. Moreover, IWs may also be unable even to articulate which patterns might be of interest. Accordingly, the process of extracting useful patterns from increasingly copious and complex data presents a significant challenge.